n my opinion the best free and legal English television available to viewers in the Valencia region of Spain is achieved by installing two dishes and Spanish Digital Terrestrial TV. One of these dishes is aimed at the Astra group of satellites at 28 ° east and the other is aimed at Nilesat at 7° west. The dish aimed at Astra at 28˚could be your existing big dish or a one meter dish for those viewers not wanting a big dish. I do not advise installing a motorized dish to access multiple satellites with one dish. I will discuss this in a later article
The Astra group of satellites at 28˚ provides the greatest number of free English channels including the BBC , ITV, Channel 4 and Five (for those customers owning a big Dish). However unless one is paying for Skytv there are very few Movie and Series channels available on Astra. If you have a big dish and the BBC and ITV channels have disappeared in the late evening there is not much to watch, unless you have Nilesat.
Nilesat is an Arab owned satellite focused on the Middle East and North Africa and therefore includes Spain in the footprint (reception area). There are an estimated 360 million viewers in the Middle East that enjoy watching English television, consequently there are 15 free channels in English that are available 24/7 and many of the programs showing, are the same ones that customers pay SkyTV to watch. There are many more English channels on Nilesat that are encrypted which require a subscription card. With the weak pound the SkyTV packages are better value than those offered on the Nilesat platform.
The English channels on Nilesat include four 24 hr movie channels (1,200 movies per month) and six English entertainment channels all for free. Many of the popular series that show on sky TV are on Nilesat such as, Prison Break, House, Grays Anatomy, Shark, Top Gear, Friends and 24 to name just a few. There are also three kids’ channels, a cooking channel, action TV, comedy and 4 news channels. If you have a skybox or freesat box you will need another set top box to watch Nilesat. If you don’t have a sky box and have a one meter dish on Astra and a 85 cm dish on Nilesat you only need one generic set top box that will switch from Satelite to satellite instantly. If your TV does not have digital terrestrial TV incorporated in the system you have to have another set top box for the Spanish TV. To avoid having three boxes you can buy a combination set top box that decodes both satellite and terrestrial TV. We recommend the Illusion set top boxes which have the most "user friendly" channel lists. We have written the detailed instructions for the Illusion boxes in English which are available on our site www.swiftbox.net.
The commercial arm of Satelite TV broadcasting does not provide many knowledge programs for free (National Geographic, Discovery, Animal Planet etc). The answer to receiving these programs for free in English is Spanish Digital terrestrial TV. There are a lot of these great programs on Spanish TV every day. Most of these programs are broadcast in Spanish and English, you have to change the audio from Spanish to English with your remote control.
In the next issue we will show you how to repair and clean your remote control
For more information call
Chris on 680 357 586
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